Yourself! Fitness (PS2)

Have you ever wanted to work out in the comfort of your own home? Have you ever wanted your own personal trainer to keep you motivated? Are you tired of watching the same old VHS or DVD workout tapes? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may want to look into Yourself! Fitness.

When you first run the game, it will go through a “fitness evaluation” where it will collect your height, weight, resting, and non-resting heart rates. The game will also want you to do push-ups, 2 minutes of jumping jacks (hard when you’re out of shape), crunches, and flexibility stretches. The results will determine what your fitness training focus will be. You’ll have to repeat this evaluation after every ten workouts. There are user profiles and a guest pass so your settings will stay unique to you.

You can work on:

Cardio

Core-body strength

Flexibility

Lower-body strength

Upper-body strength

Weight-Loss

There are so many options to help you meet your goals. You can set up a commitment schedule where you can determine how often and how long you want your workouts to be. There’s a meal plan where you can set your calorie intake and there are over 4500 recipes to keep your diet interesting. I did not try any of the recipes, so I can’t tell you how good they are. Yourself! Fitness integrates with workout equipment you may already have such as: hand weights, stability ball, step, and heart-rate monitor.

The workouts themselves are pretty formulaic but different each time. You’ll start out with warm ups like step-touch, shuffles, and light kicks, and you’ll then go into tougher things like karate kicks with a squat, hops, jumping jacks. double jacks, and more. After those, you’ll work on your focus area and then a cool down with quad and hamstring stretches along with the occasional neck stretch. There are cool downs and water breaks along the way. As you progress to the next phase of your workout, Maya the trainer will ask you how you’re keeping up. Depending on your answer, she will adjust the difficulty accordingly. Each Workout is unique and they'll throw in new exercises to mix things up. At the end of the work out, it will tell you what new exercises were introduced and how many calories were burned.

The interface is very easy to use and navigate through. On the bottom of the screen there is a time countdown and the workout modules scroll across from right to left. The exercise segments vary from 5 seconds to 1 minute or more, but are typically 15-30 seconds each. As the exercise and break modules line up on the bottom of the screen, you can see what’s queued up and coming at you.

If you keep meeting your commitments, you will unlock new music genres and workout locations. The workout locales range from a Dojo, Mountain, Desert and Island retreats, and a yuppie high rise. Each location is relaxing and has some background activity like hot air balloons, helicopters or bicyclists passing by. The scenery looks great and you almost feel like you’re there. Maya looks fairly life-like, though you can tell she’s animated. The camera angling is good for the most part, but I have experienced some weird angling problems. Fortunately, they correct themselves within 30 seconds or so.

There are many music genres available but to be honest, they are quite forgettable and pretty much all sound the same. You can choose from dance, Latin, hip-hop, house, and techno. Maya’s movements are tied to the music’s beats per minute, and she will sometimes pause to find the beat before moving on. The voice acting is pretty well done but it doesn’t give her that much of a personality. They tried by giving her a couple of cheesy lines.

I’m not really one for Yoga but there is a meditation garden area where you can do some twenty minute yoga routines with Maya. Some of the stretches have questionable names or references like the moon goddess pose, etc. Other than that this game is pretty clean.

If you’re looking to tone up, lose weight or stay motivated I would highly recommend this title. I haven’t really tried the recipes or yoga, but the workouts are pretty good. I did notice a difference and my muscles got toned. There were some days where I was sore, but it was a good experience.

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